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Scientists Recover Wooly Mammoth Blood
westtxfun writes
"'Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.' As scientists unearthed the recent find, very dark blood flowed out from beneath the mammoth, and the muscle tissue was red. This is the best-preserved specimen found so far and they are hopeful they can recover DNA and clone a mammoth. Semyon Grigoriev, one of the researchers, said, 'The approximate age of this animal is about 10,000 years old. It has been preserved thanks to the special conditions, due to the fact that it did not defrost and then freeze again. We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free herself and died. Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well. The upper torso and two legs, which were in the soil, were gnawed by prehistoric and modern predators and almost did not survive.'"
Tiger blood is just so passe now.
Wooly mammoth vacuum cleaners, wooly mammoth shower heads, the possibilities for the modern stone age family are endless...
Being a pretentious douche, however, is universal (ok, maybe not among those aboriginal groups).
A custom that is dying a bit on account of the advent better small, local, and craft beers. Now if the smaller breweries can only avoid fratricide. But, seriously, would you want to drink American mega-brews at a temperature you could taste them?
Carpaccio, mett, kifto, sakuraniku (or any sashimi like basashi with meat), and dare I look at Wikipedia to find more? In any case, I wouldn't suggest destroying the flavor of this carefully aged meat with the application of heat. Besides, think of all the jokes a person could make with this coming from a steppe country. Mammoth tartare, etc... actually, there's no etc. That's all I've got. And given that preparation isn't actually mongol, meh.
No, not really. Steak Tartar -for example- originated in Europe. France to be more specific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_tartare Check out the History and Regional variations sections. Not too mention the Swedish 'Rabiff' version which usually resembles the Danish version pretty closely.
Even better: to do so with stone age weapons.
Stone-age mammoth hunting techniques tended to be group activities --- you needed many people with spears to wear a mammoth down from blood loss, or even drive it off a cliff. I doubt the type of folks who blow megabucks to compensate for their lacking manliness by murdering some poor big game critter from a distance would be interested in authentic re-creation of human cooperative social activities. Not that they wouldn't be interested in torturing a dying mammoth with some symbolic spear-thrusts after someone else has used modern technology to render the beast harmless and helpless.
What kind of 2-bit "internet hero" are you to think that, because your managed managed to reach nature.com, you now know more about DNA and cloning than the chief scientist Semyon Grigoryev, professor at North-East Federal University?
The kind that can do math? From that very article:
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
Emphasis mine.
So 10K years -- enough material and it should certainly be possible.
You don't need a full piece of DNA, just lots of small pieces you can combine into a full one. While I appreciate that posting on /. gives you the ability to second guess any amount of considered research and scientific understanding, from time to time reality does kick in.
The half life of all DNA is 521 years.
Did you even READ that article?
"After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate."
So, that 'half life' is for buried bones in fairly specific situations. It doesn't apply everywhere.
Best part of all, is that story you linked to has its own related stories, and the first link is another story where they recovered DNA from 19,000 year old eggshells.
The second link is a story about sequencing the DNA from 100,000+ year old polar bears. Where the 'cold DRY' environment allows DNA to be preserved.
"I do not think that word means what you think it means."
What the fuck? Stop making rules for drinking beer... or anything else for that matter. It tastes best however the fuck I want to drink it. My aunt drinks hot tap water. Fucking weird shit, but I'm not pretentious enough to tell her how she's "doing it wrong"
Americans don't realize that if they raised their animals well that raw meat would be pretty safe.
Oh, I think we realize that. What we also realize is that if we serve undercooked meat to our customers and they happen to get sick from that or anything else, they will sue us and win. Better to be safe than sorry, even if it destroys the taste. This is why we can't have nice things.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.